We are so proud to be bringing over 20 local, national and international speakers to Halifax. These fine folks will be touching on topics around development, design, content, marketing, admin, community, mental health, business and more. So much variety to experience on September 7th!
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Alison Knott
Alison Knott is an international, creative tech speaker who’s passionate about the intersection of web, creativity, and business.
A proud woman in tech, Alison founded our WordPress conference and Meetup, mentors emerging female designers, and entertains business owners with nerdy facts.
Her main mandate: to raise web literacy for small business and entrepreneurs. Her presentations are an unusual blend of high-octane enthusiasm and actionable lessons. Boring tech jargon has no place in her talks!
Anita Kirkbride
Trying to keep up with ever-changing social media trends is exhausting, even for the most caffeinated among us. But Twirp Communications founder Anita Kirkbride is here to help you save all that coffee money.
Anita’s social media experience extends all the way back to the 90s, when she joined the first generation of bloggers, launching a crafting blog in a flurry of cardstock, buttons, and fabric swatches. She promoted it using new-at-the-time marketing tactics like blog circles, link parties, and roundups.
A few years later, Anita left her communications job and embarked on a mission to conquer the brave new world of digital communications—and Twirp Communications was, um…hatched. Since 2011, she’s been empowering entrepreneurs to share their stories on social media through consulting, training sessions, and blogging. She’s also the pioneer behind Responsible Scheduling—a set of guidelines for scheduling posts that helps clients make the most of their content without overwhelming or ignoring their audience.
But Anita doesn’t do all her talking online. She’s also a public speaker specializing in (you guessed it) social media. Over the years, she’s shared her expertise with audiences at Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference, Blog Jam, PodCamp, the Centre for Women in Business, and many other local events. She’s also the Founder of Social Media Day Halifax and HaliBlab: A Halifax small business podcast.
If you need her, she’s not hard to find. Your best bet is to look online—chances are good she’s on Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. If that fails, just look for someone attempting to cuddle with a disgruntled calico cat or sniffing bunches of cilantro in the produce aisle.
Christophe Jourdan
Christophe is a web developer and creative, self-taught, passionate about design, and a musician. He is also into photography and film making and keeps up with new technologies.
Corinne Boudreau
Corinne Boudreau (Online Business Lawyer) and Victoria McIntosh (Information and Privacy Professional)
Corinne Boudreau has been a practising business lawyer in Halifax, NS since 2002. She has developed online legal templates and programs so that legal information and tools will be more accessible to small business owners in Canada. Corinne also teaches a program she designed, “Legal Essentials for Business Growth” through Workplace Education to groups of business owners.
Victoria McIntosh is an independent information professional, operating under her business name Information in Bloom Management Services since 2013. She holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario and an honors BA in History from Mount Allison. Corinne is a Certified Information Privacy Technologist.
Crystal Picard
Crystal Picard is a Halifax-based graphic designer and content strategist. Passionate about building community and helping others achieve their dreams, Crystal works one-on-one with Small Businesses to develop content strategies, create effective print and web design, and implement audience-focused digital marketing to achieve their business goals. @crystalpicard
David Moore
Founder/CEO of Tea North® Organic Iced Teas and WooCommerce developer, David Moore has been coding since age 10, in sales since age 12, and has been an entrepreneur since age 16.
With 12+ years experience in eCommerce as a developer and as an eCommerce business owner, David combines best practices and real-world experience to provide the best possible solution to his clients and customers.
Denise Alison
Denise Alison is a speaker with a gift for engagement. From years of experience with live video, she brings her passion for social media, her crackling sense of humour, and—of course—a breadth of knowledge on all things social media to the stage.
With social media changing faster than you can double-tap on Instagram, there are thousands of resources out there for your audience to learn the ropes themselves. Denise aims to cut out the trial and error, providing your event with insight and actionable steps that will leave every person with a sense of purpose at the end of her talks.
You can expect each presentation to be tweaked with your audience in mind, covering the information that will make the most impact for the level your attendees are at.
Enrique Hoyos
Leveraging quantitative and qualitative data, Enrique helps businesses understand their customers to develop integrated marketing strategies that connect brands to their consumer needs.
An expert in web analytics, Enrique helps clients improve their website and digital marketing performance to generate what matters most – business results.
Ifo Ikede
Ifo Ikede is Isoko, from the Niger-delta region of the west coast of Africa, and is Founder of a social media and marketing company focused on helping non-profits and businesses to better market to clients from non-English and non-French cultural background.
Their experiences as an immigrant to Canada, as well as active participation in settlement for both immigrant and refugee groups, and their involvement in First Nations and African Canadian integration issues, as well as the thousands of years of wisdom from the ancestors, put Ifo in a unique position to provide insights from lived experience to create healthy and healing communities.
Ifo is addicted to drumming and dancing, often dancing 3 to 5 times a week, is a competitive soccer player and martial artist … and, like many African grandmas, loves to cook and share yummy treats.
Jeremy Josey
Jeremy is a full stack developer from Halifax, Nova Scotia who has been developing websites for over 17 years, starting with asp classic and then progressing to PHP.
He is a developer with Resulta, located in Bedford, Nova Scotia. Additionally, Jeremy has been developing themes and plugins for WordPress for over five years.
Keegan Francis
Keegan Francis is the co-founder of Atlantic Blockchain Company, an education-based company aiming to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology.
Keegan brings his experience as a public speaker, educator, and developer to the world of cryptocurrency to clear up misconceptions and make the information accessible to the general public.
Michael MacMillan
Michael has been curious about why things rank in search results for over 20 years.
Since 2009, all his job titles have had SEO in them, with roles ranging from in-house to leading an agency’s SEO team.
As a consultant, he now empowers teams to consider organic search in all strategies. Michael knows his stuff and can help your team improve their SEO game.
Nadia Nasrallah
Nadia has been creating Amazon Affiliate websites since 2011. During Christmas break, before her last semester at NSCC as a Programming student, she decided to begin her first Amazon affiliate site. Within 4 weeks, she began to get visitors…and her first commissions. By the time she returned to school for the winter semester, she was already making a small passive income.
Fast forward to today and a few major Google algorithm changes later, and she has created several Amazon niche sites. Her biggest one yet is a site centred around camping gear reviews.
Over the past 10 years, she has been creating WordPress sites as a freelancer. However, affiliate marketing has become her passion. She is also the proud creator of the Amazon Affiliate Blueprint course, which she launched at the beginning of August.
In her spare time, she enjoys playing video games, reading books, and hitting the gym with a coffee in hand.
Shaun Whynacht
For Shaun Whynacht, small business is a way of life.
In fact, the entrepreneurial spirit is practically woven into his DNA. As a small boy, he tagged along with his grandfather as he maintained a successful TV repair business. Later, he helped renovate the kitchen for his grandmother’s cake shop and all the while, his mother ran a craft business in his childhood home. Unsurprisingly, by the time he was in high school, Shaun went into business for himself.
Upon completion of his college studies in television production, he spent more than a decade exploring every corner of Canada and learning about the business world as an employee. From non-profits to corporations and revenue development to web design, Shaun has seen it all.
Like many small business owners, Shaun wanted the flexibility to take his son to school and spend time with his family at home. Experience had shown him that small business could meet his personal and professional needs and the research was clear – small business is the wave of the future. Eventually, he knew it was time to set out on his own…for good.
Inspired by his family legacy of business ownership and armed with the desire for fulfilling work and time with his family, Shaun ditched the suit and tie and founded Blue Cow.
And he’s been leading the charge ever since.
He has honed his skills with boots on the ground and both eyes focused on the future. A self-professed learning addict, Shaun spends his “downtime” keeping up with the latest trends in technology, marketing, and design so he can put them to work for you. The results are just like you imagine a blue cow might be – stunning and unique.
Not a fan of pushy sales or get rich quick schemes, he will help you stay focused on the long game with brilliant marketing tools, insightful strategy, and time-saving automation. No stuffed shirt here! His shorts and collared shirt suit him just fine, thank you. Plus, comfort and stretch is essential for showcasing his ninja moves and flexing his marketing muscle.
Shawn Hooper
Hailing from Ottawa, Canada, Shawn has been building web applications since the late 90s, with a focus on WordPress since 2011. He is the Director of IT at Actionable, a learning and development startup based in Toronto. He is a core contributor to the WordPress open source project, and has spoken at WordPress events in Canada, the United States and Australia. Shawn was the lead organizer of WordCamp Ottawa 2018.
Stephanie Lummis
Stephanie Lummis is a seasoned User Experience (UX) strategist and practitioner with over 20 years of experience. She works closely with clients to understand their business and craft customer-centric experiences that focus on measurable results.
Stephanie has led over 100 User Experience projects, providing strategic consulting in digital strategy and transformation, user experience and usability, information architecture, accessibility, content strategy and web writing, and web governance.
She has been an independent UX Consultant since 2017, after spending 12 years as a User Experience Lead at a digital agency. Prior to this, Stephanie spent 10 years in Vancouver, first as EMarketing Manager with a corporate email service provider, then as Product Manager of a visual search engine. Her industry experience ranges from government and economic development to tourism to post secondary education.
Stephanie loves to share her knowledge and has presented at many national conferences on topics including web writing, mobile user experience, content strategy, usability, and content governance. She was a lecturer for the first post-secondary Internet marketing degree program in North America at the University of British Columbia. She created and facilitates a User Experience course for Saint Mary’s University Executive & Professional Development.
Stephanie has been a volunteer role model with Techsploration for the past 12 years. She has a Business Administration degree from Acadia University.
Tim Covell
Tim is a writer and editor. He built his first website, using Notepad, in 1997, after deciding there was room on the internet for one more site. He looks after several WordPress sites, both .com and .org, and assists individuals and small organizations to maintain and update their sites.